


ghosting

by fulllsun (MikaCoal), mangi (rochan_lves)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Crack Treated Seriously, Fluff, Fluff and Crack, Gen, Humor, M/M, POV Alternating, more like, other tags to be added if we think of any!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28624536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MikaCoal/pseuds/fulllsun, https://archiveofourown.org/users/rochan_lves/pseuds/mangi
Summary: in which mark has been studying in the library for a long time, and that along with the excess of coffee and sleep deprivation has messed up his ability to distinguish the real from the imaginary, which is why he issurehe saw a ghost;or the one where donghyuck gets drunk on a school night and reasons that it's better to just sleep at work than to go back to his dorm and get scolded by his roommate.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Kudos: 41





	ghosting

**Author's Note:**

> the → ← marks a POV change !

If you asked Mark what time it was, he would tell you that he wasn't quite sure, but that he could confidently say that he had just discovered the taste of the colour green.

The sun had set what felt like days ago, by that point, it felt like life had certainly moved on without him since he first set foot in the library, but still, there Mark sat, alone in a barely lit library except for the piles of books and notebooks and loose papers strewn about the table.

All his.

Well, mostly all his. Some of them were from Taeil. He also borrowed quite a few notes from Jeno.

Point is, Mark was certainly not going anywhere anytime soon.

Like a very high stakes game of Jenga, Mark reached above his very expensive Experimental Physics textbook with very, very shaky hands and tried to get the one remaining cup that still had coffee in it and not spill it on everything in the process.

He barely managed, and noted with a wince that he had already spilled coffee at some point and stained spots all around the table, and he was gonna have to clean that up. Along with the other five empty cups that were left all over the place.

Fun.

Still, he couldn't just leave a mess, even if only for the fact that he really, really shouldn't have been there.

By the grace of whatever higher being that heard his prayers, he managed to sweettalk Baekhyun into leaving once his shift was over and let Mark close up himself when he was done, it'd be fine, he was just gonna take a little bit more.

Oh, how quickly things get out of control.

Since his eyes felt like they were about to pop out of the sockets and roll onto the table, Mark decided to take a break, enjoy his cold, kinda gross coffee, and the very creepy sight that was the enormous campus library with not another living soul inside of it if not for Mark himself.

Yeah, now that he really stopped to look around, it was really creepy. A little too creepy, if you asked him.

Just as the thought of heading home popped into his head, he reminded himself the reason why he was there in the first place. He had two days to prepare for a barrage of tests that he didn't feel ready for in the least, and he knew from experience that two days was not a lot of time.

With a sigh, Mark set his newest empty cup of coffee as far away from the books as he could manage while sitting down, and resigned to reality.

He did manage to catch a glimpse of his watch as he looked back down, 2:47am. Way too late to be out in the library. His head felt like someone had replaced his brain with cotton balls. Except that the cotton balls felt like barbed wire. If he were to be honest, he was barely even reading at that point, his eyes were just blankly scanning the pages, so he should have just packed up and gone home. Right?

Thirty minutes passed before Mark raised his head back up from the endlessly droning print in front of him, and he would have taken longer if it wasn't for the loud bang that suddenly went through the library.

→ ←

"Fucking loud ass, heavy ass door. Oh my god, fuck this," Donghyuck hiss-whispered at the aforementioned door, bracing himself on the wall right next to it, trying to gather the strength to continue his mission.

The mission happened to be sneaking into the library after hours and making himself very comfortable on one of the bean bags they had spotted around the shelves so he could sleep off his buzz.

Sure, maybe Johnny said that it wasn't exactly a buzz, per se, he said something more along the lines of 'completely shitfaced', but Donghyuck didn't really bother with semantics.

Also, he wasn't shitfaced, he didn't even hesitate before using the word 'semantics' in his own head! Ha! Could a shitfaced person do that?!

His conscience supplied the unhelpful fact that he had just accidentally slammed the door shut while trying to sneak around, but he chose to ignore it.

Still, with what was maybe a little too much pep in his step, he carried on, trying not to bump into too many things as he walked along and mentally preparing for the stairs that stood between him and glorious, glorious bean bags.

Felt like a fitting end to the night, really, it's not like he'd put too much thought into anything that had happened that far.

It started with catching up to Johnny after class, and Johnny just so happened to be on his way to get a beer or two with Yuta, and Yuta just so happened to be four beers in with Jaehyun by the time they made it there, so Donghyuck and Johnny clearly had to catch up.

A shame, really, that by the time Donghyuck was done with his third beer and Johnny on his fourth, he was considerably drunker than anyone else at the table. He didn't let his height affect him most of the time, but there were a few situations that his vertical condition kind of held him back.

He got made fun of, obviously, but it wasn't something that stung, so he just soaked into the attention of being not only the youngest, but also drunk, which was apparently cute as hell. He wasn't mad at it.

In the midst of recounting the night's events to himself in his head, Donghyuck walked face first into a shelf while trying to make a turn, the whole metal structure groaning for a second to compliment the inhuman noise that left Donghyuck as he put his face in his hands.

"Fuckin' hell," he grunted, appreciating the fact that at least he hadn't just toppled the whole thing over. That would have probably cost him his job.

Not that him just being there at that time and in that state wasn't more than enough for that already.

Now that he thought about it, someone else just got real fucking lucky that he was breaking a few rules himself, because the door wasn't locked when he arrived, and he wasn't gonna be able to say a thing about it without giving away that he had snuck his intoxicated little ass inside in the middle of the night.

With another groan as he held his palm against when his cheek made contact with what was apparently a book about Philosophy, he kept walking, nearing the stairs slowly, and then stopping fully once he realized that he could see a light on in the corner of the second floor.

He knew for a fact that the cleaning crew went through the library at ten at night at the very latest. So why the hell was there a light on when he was supposed to be the only hooligan in there?

Just as he tried to gather all his few sober brain cells to try and figure out what the hell was going on, a chair creaked, and he heard slow, but steady footsteps.

Donghyuck didn't believe in ghosts. There was a lot he didn't believe in, really, and not believing in things made them not scary, but Donghyuck believed in humans, and those were scary as hell.

Especially in that situation. Either that person worked at the library too and Donghyuck was about to get chewed out beyond belief - he was the latest hire, after all -, or that person was not the kind of person Donghyuck wanted to run into in an enclosed, relatively isolated place alone.

He reached for his phone, wracking his brain to remember the schedule and who'd be closing up on a Thursday, and after a few long seconds, scrolled down his contact list to Baekhyun.

**[3:19am]** _smthns fishy at the library_  
**[3:19am]** _came here to get some stuff and theres someone inside_

Turning tail and walking as quietly and quickly as his legs could manage, Donghyuck hid behind one of the shelves, peeking over the books in front of him to see if someone was actually coming downstairs. 

He got his answer fast, firstly just seeing legs and then someone stepping closer and closer. Trying to think quickly, he ducked, heading in the other direction and turning to a different row, looking for places he could at least hide in before he slipped out.

Honestly, he should have just headed back to the dorm and faced Doyoung. A scolding about sleeping early and it being a school night was nowhere near as bad as the way his heart was racing in his chest and his hands were shaking. Well, kind of. Doyoung was also pretty scary, even if Donghyuck would never admit it out loud.

The adrenaline helped with the alcohol, though, he barely felt drunk anymore, he just felt terrified and very alert instead. Decent trade-off.

He changed his mind about that fairly quickly as he tried to smoothly slide under a table and instead made the thing scrape along the floor as he fit under it, the awful high pitched sound it made bouncing off the walls and drawing attention right over to him.

→ ←

Maybe Baekhyun was back. Mark was about to get an absolute earful, if that was it. Yeah, surely that was it. Had to be Baekhyun.

But Baekhyun would have texted. He wouldn't just make a ruckus in the library at that time, either. 

So maybe it wasn't Baekhyun that made that loud bang. Mark wasn't sure if that was better.

He sat still for a few seconds, not even breathing as he waited to see if there was going to be another noise, and then there wasn't. Blissful silence.

Yeah, totally blissful.

Ignoring the spike of anxiety that ran through him, Mark turned his head back down to the book and fruitlessly tried to focus back on the words, if only so he wouldn't freak out. The silence didn't want to work with him, though.

Another noise, this one sounding closer yet, followed by what sounded like another bang, metal creaking, and maybe a voice, - the latter so faint that Mark barely even registered it.

Hand drifting over to the cross he always wore around his neck, his eyes widened.

He got made fun of all the time - mostly by his own friends, the bastards - for being such a scaredy cat, for praying before horror movies, but dangit, he owned the fact that he was a sensitive soul, and a dark, empty library was creepy enough by itself, and that wasn't even including Caspar the Loud Ass Ghost down on the first floor trying to get a rise out him.

Probably didn't help matters that just the week before, Chenle had managed to rope Mark into watching The Conjuring. That was a very, very dumb decision, he said so then, and he's getting confirmation for it now. Things were starting to get a little too similar to a low budget horror movie for Mark's fragile nerves.

Before he could even lie to himself and pretend that he was going back to reading like nothing happened, he heard, very clearly, footsteps. He could hear them nearing the staircase, the very one not that for from him. 

The noises seemed all over the place, metal and footsteps and whispers moving all around the lower part of the building, and didn't Mark remember hearing ghost stories about that very building when he was a freshman? He did, he distinctively remembered, and he really wished that he didn't, because logical explanations were just going right out the window for him.

Instinctively, he reached for the nearest, biggest textbook on the table, feeling the need to have something protecting him, and just then, the footsteps stopped. 

If Chenle could see him, he'd be very disappointed that Mark has learned absolutely nothing from all the horror movies he'd made him sit through over the years, because he slowly pushed himself to stand up, cringing at the noise the chair made as it scraped along the flooring, and tightly held the textbook in both hands.

He said a quick prayer, took a moment to psych himself up, and slowly but surely started making his way to the stairs. After just a couple steps, he heard his footsteps almost echoed in the other direction, and startled, hearing as they stopped when he did.

Heart almost bursting out of his chest, he shakily made his way down the first steps, looking around and seeing nothing. Quite literally. The only light he had to work with was the very faint one he was using upstairs, and the faint light that made it through the windows, and the library was _big_. 

He trudged on, only stopping again halfway down the stairs, at a screech that made Mark actually gasp out loud, head whipping in the direction of a table with two chair moved out from under it.

He felt a chill run through him. He'd just looked, there was no one there, he hadn't seen anything else move, how the hell did those chairs get shifted?

→ ←

Well, that was stupid. Now Donghyuck was stuck under the table like a jackass, and whoever that was climbing down the stairs knew that he was there for sure, if he hadn't made it obvious before. 

Knowing that he had basically no time to figure out a way to get the fuck out of dodge, his eyes darted around and settled on the lowest row of books closer to him. Well.

He loved books. He took a billion workshops about how to bind and preserve and properly handle books, treated everything with the reverence necessary, but he was about to break a personal rule about manhandling books. But hey, Ranganathan did say that books were meant to be used, right? Donghyuck was using it for a very good reason, if you asked him.

He reached for the closest one and slowly pulled it close to himself, waiting for just a second before he threw it down the space between the two shelves nearest to him, and as soon as he heard the person coming closer to investigate, slid out the other way.

There were so, so many shelves in that damn library. Donghyuck knew where everything was, could navigate those shelves like a champ, and yet everyday he complained about the amount of them, how much walking reshelving took. He found himself a changed man, because of all of a sudden, he was very grateful about how many shelves there were.

They were big and filled enough that the spaces between them were basically hallways, and Donghyuck weaved through them, switching sides to throw whoever it was off. The person was right on his tail, and by the sound of it, getting closer, so Donghyuck was starting to get a little panicked. 

Why were they even chasing him? If it was library faculty they certainly wouldn't even have bothered coming after him like this, they'd probably would have gotten campus security in there the moment the door slammed. 

Just as he started trying to conjure up an idea of what to do, he noticed the person was now in the row right next to the one he was in, running neck and neck with him. He gasped, startled, and did the first thing he thought of, pushing the books right next to him as hard as he could through the shelf before booking it in the other the direction.

→ ←

Not that Mark was an observational genius or anything, but he was fairly sure that after a few seconds of quiet after the screech sounded through the library, a book just zoomed out from under the table, and Mark just stood there, staring at it.

What the hell. 

He blinked at the book as it skid to a stop, and after a short moment of contemplation, decided that he was _absofuckinglutely_ not going over there. Maybe he should just bail. His phone was in his pocket, he'd be fine, Baekhyun could give him his stuff and a stern talking to about leaving a mess when they met up after class the next day.

His slow, tentative footsteps turned into frantic powerwalking towards the door, wanting more than anything to just get out and not deal with things that go bump in the night anymore. He walked way out of the way of the tables, walking through the rows and picking up speed the closer he got, only focusing on the destination.

Perhaps he shouldn't have been so focused on it. Before he could do much to protect himself, books flew right at his face, drawing a shriek out of him as he fell down, the books banging against his head and his hands as he scrambled backwards, terrified and not interested in staying to deal with whatever make those books hit him. Clearly they also didn't like his presence that much either.

It only took him about two seconds to push himself off the floor, almost fall on his face as he picked his textbook back up, and run as fast as his legs could take him, even if it was getting him further from the door, it was also getting him further from the book hurling ghost.

He wasn't looking at where he was going, he was just _going_ , and then suddenly, he just heard a woosh of air coming from his side followed by something knocking him to the ground.

He screamed, the something screamed, and only then did Mark really look and realise that it wasn't something, more like some _one_.

Someone, whoever he was, pushed himself off of Mark and scooted back on the floor, and when he squinted to properly look at him, he realised that the other guy looked pretty terrified himself.

"What are you doing?" The guy said, sounding put off and like he was completely in his right, despite Mark knowing that he shouldn't be in there either.

"What are _you_ doing?" Mark replied eloquently as he sat up and put a bit more distance between them, gripping his book to his chest like it'd protect him.

"I asked you first!" The reply was almost instant, and Mark was now trying to reevaluate how much danger he really was in. That guy didn't look undead or ghostly or anything. Smelled pretty drunk, and drunk was a very alive thing to be. Not necessarily much safer, though.

"I was studying. I heard weird noises and came to check what it was," Mark explained, trying to make it look like he wasn't about to pee himself just five minutes before that very moment. "What are you doing here? No one's supposed to be in here this late."

"Yeah, no shit," The other guy said with a huff of derisive laughter. "I work here. And I know for a fact that you don't, so either you broke in just to have a quick study sesh, or you're bullshitting."

"Baekhyun let me stay late." Mark deadpanned, starting to get annoyed at having to explain himself to a random drunk person. "I have exams coming up, so he did me a solid and let me close up by myself when I was done." 

The other guy just sat there for a second, scowling in thought before he reached into his pocket. For a second, Mark felt a little scared, not knowing what he was gonna take out of there, but it ended up just being his phone, and he watched as his expression shifted from incredulity to surprise to something that kind of looked like embarrassment. 

He waited quietly as the guy did his thing, and then he looked back up and softly said, "You're Mark Lee?"

Mark nodded slowly. "And you are?"

"Real dumb." The guy replied, throwing himself on the floor and lying down with his hands over his face. "And also Donghyuck. Fuck, you're not gonna mug me or something, right? Baekhyun wouldn't be friends with a mugger, I think. Shit."

Mark felt like he was just along for the ride as the guy clearly had his train of thought out loud, but now that he knew that things were (mostly) fine, his body was winding down from the nerves and he kind of felt compelled to lie down for a bit too.

"Not gonna mug you, no." he said dumbly. "You still haven't explained what you're doing here. No one's enough of a workaholic to come into work in the middle of the night smelling like alcohol just to get some extra hours in."

"Rude. I smell like Dior Sauvage." Donghyuck replied, not explaining anything as he stood back up and unceremoneously started heading towards the stairs.

"No, you smell like a distillery." Mark mumbled, mostly to himself as he followed, still too confused for his liking. He figured that he wasn't going to get a straight forward answer, though, so he might as well just see for himself. 

Didn't seem like Donghyuck heard him or even paid him much mind once they were up on the second floor, and it really did look like he worked there as he made a beeline for the staff room behind one of the information desks, the door closing behind him and leaving Mark to his own devices. 

He sighed, taking in the silence that finally fell over the room, and sat back down with his head in his hands, elbows anchored against the desk, and tried to start processing everything that had just happened. 

He got a little distracted, mind racing around itself so much so that he didn't even register the click of the faculty door opening and closing back up, nor the footsteps that softly padded around. He only looked up when he heard something being dragged, and he spotted Donghyuck dressed in sweatpants and a different t-shirt, hauling a bean bag to one of the darker corners of the second floor.

"What the hell are you doing?" Mark called out to him, brows furrowed as he watched Donghyuck flop down onto the beag bag and stretch.

"Making my bed." Donghyuck replied without even batting an eye, curling up like a cat and looking as comfortable as can be. 

Mark just gaped at him for a second, beffudled. "You're just," he paused, hands gesturing in front of him as Donghyuck raised an eyebrow at him. "Gonna take a nap?"

"You got a problem with that?" Donghyuck replied, and it would probably have been a bit more threatening if he wasn't using both his hands as a makeshift pillow and looking like he was about three seconds from nodding off.

Mark just raised his hands as if admitting defeat, and shook his head, debating whether or not he'd be able to get back into whatever else it was he was studying before. He didn't even remember.

He checked his watch, and it wasn't even four in the morning yet. Normally, he'd be in bed by two at the latest, but he was in crisis mode, and such luxuries couldn't be afforded. 

After rereading a couple of pages, he was back into it. Wishing he had more coffee and that the goddamn wooden chair he'd been sitting in all night was a bit more comfortable, but he was back into it. A while had passed already, and he was in the middle of scribbling in his notebook about the paragraph he was reading, writing in chicken scratch without even looking at the words he was putting on paper, eyes laser focused on the text, mind empty if not for phy-

"What are you studying for?" Donghyuck's voice echoed, a little too loud given that they were the only ones in there, and Mark's head snapped towards him, eyes wide for a second before he remembered that, oh yeah, Donghyuck was also there, there was other life in the world.

"Physics." Mark replied simply, turning his eyes back to the textbook despite figuring that he wasn't gonna get much more in the way of concentration.

"Ooh, I suck at that." Donghyuck said, unprompted, and Mark hummed in reply, back to trying to transcribe the information into something he could understand.

"It's basically just math on steroids. At least the stuff I'm looking at right now, Analytical Geometry, is." he said, putting his pen down and stretching out his wrists. He was way too young to get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

"Yeah, I don't do math, I'm gay." Donghyuck said it so fast that Mark nearly choked on air, laughing before he even fully processed the sentence.

"I got some people in my class who would debate you on that. Not all gays are allergic to maths." Mark felt a little compelled to let out a joke or a comment or something that made it clear that he wasn't one of the straights either, it almost seemed like Donghyuck was testing him by saying it, but he let it go, not wanting to make it look like he was trying to hard.

"This gay is. More of a words person, myself." Yeah, Mark got that memo. Donghyuck stood up and started walking towards where Mark was sitting with all the calm in the world. Instead of sitting on one of the many chairs strewn all over the room, Donghyuck perched half on top of the table itself, frowning at the myriad of books Mark had around him.

"Thought you were taking a nap." he noted, watching as Donghyuck looked more and more grossed out the more glimpses he took of the papers.

"So did I." Donghyuck said simply, not even looking at him as he plucked one of Jeno's notes and made a face at it before just putting it back with a shudder. "Gives me Math core classes flashbacks. You really like this stuff?" 

Mark paused for a second. Did he hate cramming with a passion? Absolutely. Had his course material made him cry a couple of times? For sure. But he'd bet that basically everyone felt that about their own course, and he couldn't shake off the fact that he really, really liked the idea of being a teacher. 

Some of his friends didn't get it, wanting to get into research more than anything, but Mark had always been good at school, and it was by tutoring that he got a taste of what teaching was really like. He got to see how people's eyes would just light up once they figured out exactly what it was that they'd been banging their heads against the whole time, and knowing that he'd help people through that? Nothing like it.

"Yeah. I mean, I get my ass kicked by basically every class I enroll in, but when it's fun, it's fun." he said simply, smiling a little and leaning back against his chair. His back complained at the movement, and he remembered that he'd been there for eons. His love for the whole thing faltered a bit, but he stood by his words.

Donghyuck hummed, nodding. "That's fair. I get a lot of people saying that they'd hate Library Science too, and usually what I tell them is basically what you said." He climbed off the desk and instead sat himself on the seat in front of Mark's, nose wrinkling when he noticed all the coffee cups strewn about. "You drank all this by yourself?"

"Been here a while." Mark replied with a nod, almost sheepish as he immediately started gathering the cups into one stack that turned out to be a little taller than he'd like it to be.

"Are you just gonna spend the night here studying?" 

Mark wanted to say that Donghyuck asked a lot of questions for someone who clearly didn't like answering them, but instead, he shrugged. "My classes aren't until one in the afternoon, and I still have a bunch of material to go through."

Donghyuck nodded, looked at a the desk a bit more, then clapped his hands together, stood up, and said, "Be right back."

Off he went, towards the staff room again, and Mark was alone again.

He didn't really go back to studying then, deciding to check his phone only to realize that somewhere in the kerfuffle, it'd gone flat. He reached for his backpack with his foot, nudging it closer and closer to himself until he could reach inside and fumble for his charger, taking a bit too long until he got it.

After he'd walked over to the nearest outlet and plugged his phone in, he settled back at the desk, and promptly let his head bonk against it, arms crossing over the back of his head in an effort to block out the lights that even dim as they were, were still a little too much for Mark's eyes at that point, tiredness catching up to him quick after the emotional rollercoaster that was the end of his night.

He must've fallen asleep at some point, because when he came back to, it was to the smell of freshly brewed coffee, and Donghyuck sitting in front of him again with a mug in hand, clearly steaming and fresh and perhaps Mark started drooling.

It wasn't until Donghyuck chuckled and nodded towards Mark's left that he noticed that not only was he staring, but there was also a mug next to head, and he just stared at him for a second, incredulous. "You made coffee?" he asked, already reaching for it and taking a sip.

"Yeah, we always have some on standby, back there. I didn't know how you took it and when I came to ask, you were conked out, so I just put a little bit of sugar into it. There's like, cream and stuff back inside-,"

"No, no, it's perfect," Mark interrupted, shaking his head, and it was. Usually he would put cream and more sugar, but he was already so grateful that he bothered making coffee for him that he couldn't even bring himself to want more. "Thank you, seriously."

"Hey, I threw a bunch of books on top of you, it's the least I can do." Donghyuck replied with a chuckle, both hands holding his mug in front of himself. "Sorry about that, by the way."

"We were both freaked out, don't worry," he replied with a laugh of his own, then realised that he had an opportunity. "I don't really hold grudges, but since you did throw books at me I feel like I get to know why you broke in here to nap."

Donghyuck paused, then smiled and nodded. "Fair enough." he said, taking another sip. "My roommate sleeps early and he's the lightest sleeper alive. I was drunk, and you've probably figured out that I'm not exactly quiet, and if I woke him up he'd be real mad at me, because his classes start at seven in the morning, so I thought I could just sleep in one of the bean bags, take a shower in the staff bathroom in the morning, and head over to my class at ten." 

Mark hummed in understanding. "That's. Less crazy than I was expecting." he pursed his lips when Donghyuck shrugged at him, giving it some thought. "You still drunk? You're gonna be really hungover for class tomorrow if you are."

"Nah. I mean, I'm not _sober,"_ Donghyuck said, the end of his sentence added once Mark raised an eyebrow at him. "But nothing compared to when I actually waked inside."

"Shouldn't you, like, not drink coffee, then?" Mark asked, then realized that he wasn't actually this boy's mother. "Sorry, I know it's none of my business, just," he gestured with his free hand, trying to find the words but Donghyuck stopped him, waving a hand and shaking his head.

"You're good. I'm still a little wired from, uh. You know." he said, thumb pointing at the stairs that lead down to the first floor. Yes, Mark did in fact know. "Probably won't sleep for a good while. But it's not the first all nighter I've pulled and it sure as hell won't be the last."

"I feel you." Mark smiled, and raised his coffee mug in cheers, waiting for Donghyuck to clink his against it before he took a sip.

The silence that followed wasn't awkward, which was something Mark wasn't too used to with people he'd just met. They hadn't exactly met under normal circumstances, but still, Mark was pleasantly surprised by how he hadn't felt the need to fill the dead air with small talk or whatever. 

It was Donghyuck who broke it, a few minutes later, once the coffee was mostly gone. "Why did you, like," he started, pausing as if he was carefully choosing his words. "Not say something? Earlier."

Mark didn't really reply, not knowing what Donghyuck was asking exactly, instead settling for making a noise as if asking him to elaborate.

"When you heard me, downstairs." 

"Ah." How to explain. Mark didn't know. "I got freaked out, I guess. You didn't say anything either."

"Yeah, but I actually work here and I just thought I was dealing with a burglar or a generally bad person. Which now that I think about it, it's not that logical either, but. For all you knew, I was Baekhyun coming back."

"I mean. I just heard like. Noises." Mark said vaguely, staring into the almost empty mug in his hand. "Didn't really know what to think."

There was a lull, and then Donghyuck's voice, a little too smiley for Mark's liking, "You thought I was a ghost, didn't you."

Mark, again, did not say anything back.

"Oh my god. Did they tell you the story that this place is haunted? They did, right?" Donghyuck was actually laughing now, and Mark just looked at him, not even bothering to deny it. "It's not true. Mostly because there's no such thing, but also because I know for a fact that one of the seniors who used to work here made that up like, a couple years ago and people keep telling the story to freak out the freshmen."

Mark stared at the desk for a bit, ignoring the 'no such thing' comment, then shifted his gaze back up at Donghyuck. "For real?"

"For real. I met him. Eunhyuk." Mark had no idea who that was, but he didn't doubt it. Mostly, he just felt a little dumb. "I'm kind of a fan of his, he's hilarious."

"I'll bet." Mark muttered, running his hand down his face. "Well, that's a little humiliating."

"We're all scared of something." Donghyuck shrugged, leaning against the desk on both his forearms. "I'm scared of butterflies."

"... Seriously? Butterflies?" Mark asked, trying not to laugh but having a hard time of it.

"At least butterflies are real!"

Donghyuck was easy to talk to. Mark wasn't the most socially awkward person in the world or anything, but talking to Donghyuck, after they got going, was something that he got lost into. 

They talked about their friends, finding more people they both knew other than Baekhyun, talked about their families, Mark talked about wanting to teach, and Donghyuck told him about how he'd just landed the library job that semester and how exciting that had been, and before they knew it, there was sunlight flooding the library and people were starting to walk around through the patch of campus that the windows next to them showed.

Eventually, they had to face the music and accept that time was passing, and they both had things to get to. Mark had a nice warm bed to flop onto for the next couple of hours, and he didn't want to miss out on that.

While Donghyuck hopped in the shower quickly in the staff bathroom, he let Mark sneak into the supply closet to get a few rags so he could clean up the table, and in under half an hour, everything was spotless, put away, Donghyuck was showered and dressed, and they were ready to go.

They went back to talking as they climbed down the stairs and put away things as they went, Donghyuck reshelving the books he'd pushed off and Mark resetting the chairs that had gotten in the middle of their crossfire, and soon enough they were standing in front of the library, watching as a few half dead looking students were starting to mill about, heading out of their dorm buildings off to wherever they were going. 

"Where are you heading?" Mark asked with his backpack in hands as he adjusted it to put it over his shoulders, looking at the path that was gonna lead him to your building. "I'm over that way."

Donghyuck didn't say anything back, just pressed his lips into a line and looked at something behind Mark. Before he could ask him what he was looking at, a hand made contact with his shoulder and Mark jumped, instinctively swinging the backpack into whatever it was behind him.

Turned out that it was Baekhyun, and he fell down on his ass, blinking dazedly and Mark belatedly realized that maybe that wasn't his sharpest decision.

Mark apologised profusely after he snapped out of just staring at him on the ground, helped him up, offered to buy him food, and Baekhyun, good natured as always, waved him off and just went inside, Donghyuck and Mark staring after him.

They just stood there for a second until, again, Donghyuck broke the silence.

"Wanna get some breakfast?" he asked, turning to look at Mark, who pursed his lips in thought. He _was_ planning on getting some well deserved sleep before class. He really should have headed back to the dorm already, by then.

"Sure."

**Author's Note:**

> this one's for my library science students. i have half a degree in it and the most use i ever got out of it was that one line about ranganathan. y'all are some WILD ASS nerds and i am here for it. - jae (｡･㉨･｡)
> 
> -
> 
> yes, we're here again. yes, we are multifandom (at least i am ;u; ). i hope u all like it cus my brain almost fell out of my head to think about this plot. - mangi╰(*´︶`*)╯♡
> 
> -
> 
> come scream into the void with us!
> 
> jae: 
> 
> twitter - @haechanfulllsun  
> tumblr - @haechaniechanie
> 
> mangi: 
> 
> twitter - @_crispychan_  
> tumblr - @mand-gi


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